sewing: whipup and project list
I’m strangely happy to see one of my finished works on whipup.net. I’ve been reading that site since they launched, and have gotten so much inspiration and so many tips there.
Also, I can’t remember what post it was where I was talking about my long “want to make” list, but I just found the notebook I wrote it in. Here are just the ones I wrote down — this doesn’t count the amorphous ideas I’ve got going on the back burner of my brain as well.
- knit-bottom zakka sack (finished! pic to come)
- easy sweater (knitty’s “tubey” — thanks otter!)
- lunch bag
- fabric box(es) (or bucket)
- smock
- favorite things “cute skirt”
- sew u buttondown shirt
- built by you wool coat
- quilted watchband/watch
- crocheted rug (started)
- granny square throw (started and ripped out … eh.)
- bibs for mac (bend the rules sewing pattern)
- ‘wee jacket’ (bend the rules sewing pattern)
- quilt of iain’s old clothes
- birthday gift for sister
- attic curtains
- chair seat
- pencil cup (inspired by sally)
- ironing board cover
- psv ornaments
Phew. Do you see why it’s killing me to have to wait to have my sewing room back?
Oh and hey. Two things I want to talk about: a quilted wristband for a watch (my favorite grommeted canvas one is rusting and moldy from having gone through the wash) and making a quilt of Iain’s old clothes — khaki pants and oxford shirts, a lot of navy and plum and taupe. Pattern ideas or suggestions for either of those projects? Just off the top of your head? They’re probably not going to get started until the New Year but I like thinking up a plan nonetheless.
The internet is like a warm bubbly bath today
- Iain needs this shirt:
(via Urban Baby Runway) - My friend Heather is now blogging at Askthesky. (She gets extra points for remaining calm this morning as Owen repeatedly and unabashedly felt her up. No couth, that kid.)
- I’m trying out cocomment, which I found on Citizen of the Month. It tracks and records all the comments I leave like litter throughout cyberspace.
- Signals vs Noise introduces the handy Troll Cap:
I only wish I had trolls to stick it on. - say, suebob’s got a linkateria.
- Somewhere along the line NBC.com fixed their video player to work properly with Firefox/Mac. [Who needs that when good friends tivo the episode for you, though!]
- Bloggers Anonymous: The word “bloupie” just entered my vocabulary.
- Washingtonienne to get a sitcom? [old news but news to me]
- fun things to do while your husband is sleeping.
Still more mother activism!
Via Feminist Moms:
- Code Pink: Mother’s Day Call for Peace
- Mothers Acting Up
- NOW: Mothers Matter (hey! petition!)
More mother-activism
… Over at Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS).
Mmm … political mommies … the righteousness BURNS!
“You used to love my non-sequiturs!”
Surfing (besides, ‘The Simpsons’ is not holding my attention):
- Sweatpantsmom: Bad Mommy. (it’s OK, we all do it)
- Whipup: Handcrafts in a hectic world
- Tie one on: Monthly Apron Show and tell
- Little birds and things
- heh, heh: Marthadex
Urban Baby! Contest! Free stuff!
My girl Mama C-ta also runs Urban Baby Runway, a blog that gives lots of juicy detail on the hip baby stuff you know you’d love to have.
Upshot? The May contest opened up today! Visit here, leave a comment (up to one a day til May 14!), and be entered to win a $50 gift certificate to Cute Baby Shoes (they also sell cloth diapers!).
It’s a win-win-win situation.
Supa’s Activist Corner: MomsRising
OK.
Last bit of motherly righteousness: momsrising.org. Sign a petition and let’s get this party started.
(Phew. Now I’m all mommed out. Time for reality television, or something.)
LAX hair, prepdom, instruction manuals, and my childhood
The City Paper never, ever fails to entertain and enlighten me. Earlier this year it was a piece on those ubiquitous, superlong, XXXL white T-shirts; today it’s the Balti: North Baltimore’s Lacrosse Mullet, and the Next Big Thing In Hair.
The article drew my eye for a few reasons.
1. Last night I found myself yelling at a celebrity cooking show contestant to “Cut yer goddamn hair already!” and now I am interested in developing my new-found curmudgeonliness.
2. My own shaggy mane is driving me crazy and I wish to make it stop.
3. The word “mullet” is a guaranteed attention-grabber.
Not for a long time have I actually laughed out loud — that’s LOL, doodz, and it happens IRL — at a news article. But author Gadi Dechter so deftly captured the vulnerable side of these high-school lacrosse players that I had to titter. It’s hard to imagine these suave yet shaggy preppies, who overrun the Target near Calvert Hall High School, where I shop for off-brand diapers, devoting hours of time in the mirror. Yet they manifestly do, and she proves it with heart-breaking accounts from LAX bulletin boards.
I was also caught by the notion of an insular school environment, where fashion doesn’t change for thirty years and the madras-plaid shorts of 1959 are still de rigeur. I remember that environment well. She mentions in passing The Official Preppy Handbook, a vintage copy of which I ownand rules within which I remember from my own high school experience. In fact, it had not quite sunk in til I read that book that the rest of the world was enjoying grunge while my public-school classmates and I were debating which grosgrain ribbon would best complement our Tretorn tennis shoes and argyle sweaters … in 1995, not 1980 when the tongue-in-cheek “handbook” was published.
The town I grew up in was very white, very comfortably middle class. High school football games [we didn’t have lacrosse] were a town-wide attraction; the rich were popular and vice versa. There was at least one country club on the edge of town — the poorer edge of town, not the McMansion edge of town — and my family lived near this country club. We, of course, with a household of six children, were far too poor to buy a membership or live in the adjacent $300,000 houses (read: $650,000 today in Baltimore), but we were of just the right income bracket to work there. My sister met her life-partner boyfriend while waitressing there; my brother caddied there several summers; and I endured the longest two weeks of my life there, working double shifts in the back office and as a waitress in the various club dining rooms.
(Ask me about my saucy maid’s uniform. I dare you. I was probably the only girl there blushing with embarrasment and trying to let down the hem — I was not looking for an orthodontist-slash-sugar daddy).
I digress. My point is that in this small homogeneous town, where you were either rich, richer, or living in a trailer, a particular small-town, Midwestern brand of preppiness was a way of life. Color-coordinated deck shoes, horses stabled at the riding ranch on River Road.
It wasn’t true Prep, though we did have private parochial schools. It was watered-down East Coast prep; it was Farmer’s Prep. It was as if certain of the town’s population wanted to force their own importance in a rapidly downspiraling Rust Belt economy and cling tight to some semblance of worth in a post-modern America.
Of course, it was utterly repulsive to some of us high-schoolers, particularly those who lived neither in McMansionLand nor the trailers; wanderers in a no-man’s land of fading suburbia. We railed against Preppies, we railed against Jocks; we mocked them but secretly imagined them so much more worthwhile than us.
My greatest dream, in eighth grade, was to be a cheerleader.
Of course it didn’t pan out; undeveloped wall-flowers with two left feet aren’t really what a cheer squad is all about these days. But I consider that the turning point, the month in which rejection became the standard for my life and the month in which I started thinking a little deeper. It was time for rebellion; it was time to put away the grosgrain. I cut my hair short. I started wearing flannel. I determinedly bought a Green Day album.
If this club, with it’s $60 shaggy boy heads and Abercrombie sweaters, didn’t want me, then by God I didn’t want it, either.
And so started a range of identities tried on and discarded by me and a few hundred other small-town suburbanites — pothead, black-turtleneck-wearing intellectual, militant feminist. All of us rebelled against safety and tradition and uniformity, not realizing that the rebellion itself — like these Baltimore Lacrosse players and their identical shaggy haircuts — was uniform.
In the last few years I have grown lazy in my rebellion against the small-town suburban life I professed to hate. I got married. I moved to (what is technically) suburbs. I had a kid. I took my nose piercing out. And now I’m trying to remember what it is we hated so much. The stability? Green lawns? Family vacations? Suspenders?
The high-school anti-Prep rebellion is still alive and well and wearing black eyeliner, hating anything that smacks of tradition, of stability. The rebellion undoubtedly thinks itself as hating the small-mindedness of small towns and the sleeping bigotry of suburbia, as well it should. But it is the definition of small-mindedness not to allow for variations within a population. It is the definition of bigotry to judge on appearance.
I feel for these lacrosse boys, with their faux-bedhead hair. They are trying to rebel and conform at the same time. They are trying to make their hair tell the story of their beliefs, their desires, their self-worth. I do the same thing, so I can empathize, even with a rich white boy with glowing athletic prowess. I, too, am trying to present my whole person, my ideals and my dreams, to the outside world using only my Chuck Taylors and hair gel.
Blogher Action Items!
Updated with corrected links.
Well, I couldn’t go to the conference. I’m coming to terms with that. But what I can do is catch up on what happened and do my part to broaden the discussion about women in the blogosphere, give other bloggers a hand up, and work on giving more women a voice by introducing them to blogging.
I also want to figure out what the hell I’m doing with my blogroll. It got bloated, so I trimmed it down, but didn’t like the look aesthetically, so I pondered doing some DHTML show-hide magic, but I have yet to learn how to do that, so it’s hovering in it’s own lonely PHP file here for now. I have a dozen or two links to add, and I’m thinking about ordering them into groups - but then I need to figure out some sort of grouping system and it’s all tiring. But one way for me to give other bloggers a hand up is to link to them, and that’s what a blogroll is for.
So until I do that, here are some current faves you may not be reading [yet]:
Just Down the River Road
Lita Jente writes about life as a grad student, newlywed, and recent Yankee transplant in the Deep South. She likes comic books and the Pet Shop Boys too.
casa del harrison
She quilts! [And could totally school me if she so chose]. And she just had a beautiful red-headed baby girl, Norah, and moved to Carolina. On the downside, her Volvo has a nail in it.
Delightfully Mundane
AB is a triathlete [medal-winner!] with a new job and a soft spot for random puppies in distress.
dirty olive
Is a student living in Canada with two beautiful curly-haired guys: her husband and her son. She loves her vagina, is on the brink of a new job, and is not afraid of potty training [I mean, “toilet learning.”]
mama c-ta
A fellow Baltimorean who *just* had a baby and is kind enough to blog about it in exquisite detail.
miss domestic
has a two-year-old son and is living overseas [in Germany?]. She has fantastic taste in music and enviable hair.
nordensved
Razor-sharp wit and writing that will suck you in. Her daughter is one month younger than Owen and her husband is from Sweden, a fact that is endlessly interesting to me. Sweden! It’s not just furniture, people.
talkin’ loud
Another fellow Baltimorean. Her photography knocks my socks off every time, and in RL she is sweeter than pie.
work for idle hands
The Rock Star of mommyblogging. Debbie launched Rock’n’Romp and sings in a band and might even swear more than I do.
And here are some belonging to people I met yesterday: Drowning in Kids, Spanglemonkey, burningbird, Daily Dose of Denise, Wee Hours, the Ugly Green Chair, Beth’s Blog, SoCal Mom.
There were a couple people in the chat who sounded FASCINATING [“sisoma”? Can’t remember] but I had to leave abruptly because our company had arrived. Kicking myself for not finding out more.
My last two goals are to broaden my own blogroll and find some new people to read, and to evangelize blogging to three new people. Mom, this means you. I think you need to start a blog. It would fascinate people. Readers, if you think my dear sweet mom should start a blog, please comment in favor.
The beauty of blogging is that it can be whatever you want it to be. You write as much or as little as you want. Share only photos. Share only links. Share only stories about your three-week-old baby and his constipation problem [wait — been there]. Completely personal, or completely impersonal. Blog about politics, journalism, technology, crafting, science, work, art, even Rob Thomas. Bloggers span the genders [including inbetweens and crossovers], ages [young and old. And “old” is relative. Is 75 old?], classes [you just need access to the internet, which is free at the library], countries … it’s truly fascinating, and I believe it’s a freedom we should exercise fully [if we so desire] and protect fiercely.
Imagine, a blog solely about Rob Thomas. I think it needs to be done. And I think I know just the person to do it.
tag:blogher
recent flickr
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my sewing tutorials
See my tutorials featured on SMS' Handmade Holidays!
Me, elsewhere
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- flickr photolog
- last.FM music profile
- please send vodka
- ravelry knitting notebook
- twitter tiny updates
Et cetera
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